Empire and Israelby John Pilger
www.dissidentvoice.org
July 29, 2006First Published in The New Statesman

The
National Museum of American History is part of the celebrated Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, DC. Surrounded by mock Greco-Roman edifices
with their soaring Corinthian columns, rampant eagles and chiseled
profundities, it is at the center of Empire, though the word itself is
engraved nowhere. This is understandable, as the likes of Hitler and
Mussolini were proud imperialists, too: on a "great mission to rid the
world of evil," to borrow from President Bush.

One of the museum's
exhibitions is called "The Price of Freedom: Americans at War." In the
spirit of Santa's Magic Grotto, this travesty of revisionism helps us
understand how silence and omission are so successfully deployed in free,
media-saturated societies. The shuffling lines of ordinary people, many of
them children, are dispensed the vainglorious message that America has
always "built freedom and democracy" -- notably at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
where the atomic bombing saved "a million lives," and in Vietnam where
America's crusaders were "determined to stop communist expansion," and in
Iraq where the same true hearts "employed air strikes of unprecedented
precision."

The words "invasion"
and "controversial" make only fleeting appearances; there is no hint that
the "great mission" has overseen, since 1945, the attempted overthrow of
50 governments, many of them democracies, along with the crushing of
popular movements struggling against tyranny and the bombing of 30
countries, causing the loss of countless lives. In Central America, in the
1980s, Ronald Reagan's arming and training of gangster-armies saw off
300,000 people; in Guatemala, this was described by the UN as genocide.
No word of this is uttered in the Grotto. Indeed, thanks to such displays,
Americans can venerate war, comforted by the crimes of others and knowing
nothing about their own.

In Santa's Grotto,
there is no place for Howard Zinn's honest People's History of the
United States, or I F Stone's revelation of the truth of what the
museum calls "the forgotten war" in Korea, or Mark Twain's definition of
patriotism as the need to keep "multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand
at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries." Moreover, at
the Price of Freedom Shop, you can buy US Army Monopoly, and a "grateful
nation blanket" for just $200. The exhibition's corporate sponsors include
Sears, Roebuck, the mammoth retailer. The point is taken.

To understand the
power of indoctrination in free societies is also to understand the
subversive power of the truth it suppresses. During the Blair era in
Britain, precocious revisionists of Empire have been embraced by the
pro-war media. Inspired by America's Messianic claims of "victory" in the
cold war, their pseudo-histories have sought not only to hose down the
blood slick of slavery, plunder, famine and genocide that was British
imperialism ("the Empire was an exemplary force for good": Andrew Roberts)
but also to rehabilitate Gladstonian convictions of superiority and
promote "the imposition of western values," as Niall Ferguson puts it.

Ferguson relishes "values", an unctuous
concept that covers both the barbarism of the imperial past and today's
ruthless, rigged "free" market. The new code for race and class is
"culture". Thus, the enduring, piratical campaign by the rich and powerful
against the poor and weak, especially those with natural resources, has
become a "clash of civilizations." Since Francis Fukuyama wrote his drivel
about "the end of history" (since recanted), the task of the revisionists
and mainstream journalism has been to popularize the "new" imperialism, as
in Ferguson's War of the World series for Channel 4 and his
frequent sound bites on the BBC. In this way, the public is "softened up"
for the rapacious invasion of countries on false pretences, including a
not unlikely nuclear attack on Iran, and the ascent in Washington of an
executive dictatorship, as called for by Vice-President Cheney. So
imminent is the latter that a supine Congress will almost certainly
reverse the Supreme Court's recent decision to outlaw the Guantanamo
kangaroo courts. The judge who wrote the majority opinion -- in a high
court Bush himself stacked -- sounded his alarm through this seminal
quotation of James Madison: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative,
executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or
many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be
pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

The catastrophe in
the Middle East is a product of such an imperial tyranny. It is clear that
the long-planned assault on Gaza and now the destruction of Lebanon are
Washington-ordained and pretexts for a wider campaign with the goal of
installing American puppets in Lebanon, Syria and eventually Iran. "The
pay-off time has come," wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe; "now the
proxy should salvage the entangled Empire."

The attendant
propaganda -- the abuse of language and eternal hypocrisy -- has reached
its nadir in recent weeks. An Israeli soldier belonging to an invasion
force was captured and held, legitimately, as a prisoner of war. Reported
as a "kidnapping", this set off yet more slaughter of Palestinian
civilians. The seizure of two Palestinian civilians two days before the
capture of the soldier was of no interest. Neither was the incarceration
of thousands of Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons, and the torture
of many of them, as documented by Amnesty International. The kidnapped
soldier story cancelled any serious inquiry into Israel's plans to
reinvade Gaza, from which it had staged a phony withdrawal. The fact and
meaning of Hamas's self-imposed 16-month ceasefire were lost in inanities
about "recognizing Israel," along with Israel's state of terror in Gaza --
the dropping of a 500lb bomb on a residential block, the firing of as many
as 9,000 heavy artillery shells into one of the most densely populated
places on earth and the nightly terrorizing with sonic booms.

"I want nobody to
sleep at night in Gaza," declared Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, as
children went out of their minds. In their defense, the Palestinians fired
a cluster of Qassam missiles and killed eight Israelis: enough to ensure
Israel's victimhood on the BBC; even Jeremy Bowen struck a shameful
"balance", referring to "two narratives." The historical equivalent is not
far from that of the Nazi bombardment and starvation of the Jewish Warsaw
Ghetto. Try to imagine that described as "two narratives."

Watching this unfold
in Washington -- I am staying in a hotel taken over by evangelical
"Christians for Israel" apparently seeking rapture -- I have heard only
the crudest colonial refrain and no truth. Hezbollah, drone America's
journalistic caricatures, is "armed and funded by Syria and Iran," and so
they beckon an attack on those countries, while remaining silent about
America's $3billion-a-day gift of planes and small arms and bombs to a
state whose international lawlessness is a registered world record. There
is never mention that, just as the rise of Hamas was a response to the
atrocities and humiliations the Palestinians have suffered for half a
century, so Hezbollah was formed only as a defense against Ariel Sharon's
murderous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which left 22,000 people dead. There
is never mention that Israel intervenes at will, illegally and brutally,
in the remaining 22 percent of historic Palestine, having demolished
11,000 homes and walled off people from their farmlands, and families, and
hospitals, and schools. There is never mention that the threat to Israel's
existence is a canard, and the true enemy of its people is not the Arabs,
but Zionism and an imperial America that guarantees the Jewish state as
the antithesis of humane Judaism.

The epic injustice
done to the Palestinians is the heart of the matter. While European
governments (with the honorable exception of the Swiss) have remained
craven, it is only Hezbollah that has come to the Palestinians' aid. How
truly shaming. There is no media "narrative" of the Palestinians' heroic
stand during two uprisings, and with slingshots and stones most of the
time. Israel's murders of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall have left them
utterly alone. Neither is the silence of governments all that is shocking.
On a major BBC program, Maureen Lipman, a Jew and promoter of selective
good causes, is allowed to say, without serious challenge, that "human
life is not cheap to the Israelis, and human life on the other side is
quite cheap actually . . ."

Let Lipman see the
children of Gaza laid out after an Israeli bombing run, their parents
petrified with grief. Let her watch as a young Palestinian woman -- and
there have been many of them -- screams in pain as she gives birth in the
back seat of a car at night at an Israeli roadblock, having been willfully
refused right of passage to a hospital. Then let Lipman watch the child's
father carry his newborn across freezing fields until it turns blue and
dies.

I think Orwell got
it right in this passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four, a tale of the
ultimate empire: "And in the general hardening of outlook that set in . .
. practices which had been long abandoned -- imprisonment without trial,
the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract
confessions . . . and the deportation of whole populations -- not only
became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who
considered themselves enlightened and progressive."

John Pilger is an internationally renowned investigative
journalist and documentary filmmaker.His newest book is Freedom Next Time
(Bantam Press, June 2006). Visit John Pilger's website:
www.johnpilger.com.